Are Animals Capable of Having Concepts and Beliefs?
Concepts, Dualism, and The Human Intellect by Professor David Oderberg. Dr. Oderberg argues that our capacity to form concepts (a capacity which he regards as unique to human beings) is an immaterial capacity, and is therefore not realised in the brain. Excerpt: [A]n older way of arguing for dualism, based on the Aristotelian tradition, does not invoke anything subjective, first-personal, or phenomenological. Instead, it identifies a feature of human beings more amenable to third-personal investigation – the activity of reason. According to this kind of argument, human beings engage in a kind of activity that resists materialistic reduction, a position that can be established without appeal to anything necessarily subjective or perspectival in what each person knows about themselves. The idea is that intellectual activity – the formation of concepts, the making of judgments, and logical reasoning – is an essentially immaterial process. By essentially immaterial is meant that intellectu
